others, again, looking out of a train window. There are as many ways as individuals. To listen to Mrs. de Montmorency Smith telling her tedious dream, while you hear just enough to comment intelligently upon her endless details, even using some of these details to feed your own more valuable dream, is an admirable method--I am told; and my own childish habit of squeezing "through the crack between yesterday and to-morrow" in that horrible bed of East 19th Street, merely happened to be my own little personal adaptation of the principle....
Incidents that had held a touch of comedy remain more clearly in the memory than those that held ugliness and horror only. A member of the Reichstag Central Party, for instance, Rector Ahlwardt by name, came out to conduct a campaign against the Jews. He was violently anti-semitic. I was sent to meet his steamer at Quarantine because I could speak German, and my instructions were to warn him that America was a free country, that the Jews were honourable and respected citizens, and that abuse would not be tolerated for a moment. These instructions I carried out, while we drank white wine in the steamer's smoking-room. Freytag, I noticed with amusement, himself a Jew, was there for the Staatszeitung.
Ahlwardt, however, was impervious to advice or warnings. At his first big meeting in the Cooper Union Hall, arriving late, I noticed at once two things: the seats were packed with Jews, while almost as many policemen stood about waiting; and the reporters' tables underneath the platform showed several open umbrellas. Both, I knew, were ominous signs. Ahlwardt himself, fat, beaming, in full evening dress, was already haranguing the huge audience. At first he was suave and gentle, even mealy-mouthed, but before long his prejudices mastered him and his language changed. Up rose a member of the audience and advised him angrily to go back to Germany. The police ejected the interrupter. Others took his place. Then suddenly the fusillade began--and up went the
reporters' umbrellas! A flying egg caught the speaker
